Copying files to external drive causes spinning wheel issues

T

TechStuey05

Gawd
Joined
Aug 5, 2005
Messages
902
Hi, I have a Windows Vista computer and a western digital 2 TB USB External Hard Drive. I have about 160gb of data that I want to copy to my External Hard Drive. When I begin pasting the files to the external drive I get the spinning wheel and it doesn't go away, the spinning wheel only appears when I place my cursor over the folder of the external drive, after that I also can't close the folder without windows explorer restarting.

Also it shows the wrong progress time of how long before all the files are copied. It usually starts off about right when I first begin copying the files to the external but then it gives the wrong amount of time and it stops progressing.

Should I just leave it and let it copy all the files? Is it safe to do that? I also re-formated (quick format) the external drive as NTFS just incase there were some issues on the external drive but there was no change.

Is my external hard drive defective or is it my computer causing the issue? I just purchased it from Newegg a few days ago. Please help
 
The wheel indicates that the system is "busy" and that you can't perform any actions. That's the correct behavior when you hover over the destination directory during a transfer. You can do other things, but you can't perform any actions relating to the destination folder.

How much disk activity do you see when it stops progressing?
 
Thanks for the help. Task Manager is showing it as not responding yet I see the files being added to the folder as it's copying. Do you think that the files being copied are ok and not being corrupted? Should I plug in another external to see if this repeats? What else can I try? I appreciate the help
 
Odds are the computer is trying to shove things to the external drive quicker than it can take them, and once the PC uses up available RAM to buffer things (which causes the intial time to look ok), then it slows up to match the speed the external drive can write at (which is when you get the wheel and the time climbs up).

Just let it be and it should finish the copy just fine.
 
I appreciate the help. All the files copied over and the progress bar disappeared. The files seem to be ok.
 
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